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Valve Eliminates Class and Fee Needed to Use SteamVR Tracking

That's $3,000 developers can now keep for other aspects of their games.

Since August, SteamVR has had a cutting-edge tracking system that can be used by developers royalty-free. The hitch has been that if they wanted to use the technology, they had to pay $3,000 for a course on how to use it. Not any more.

Valve has nixed the fee and the need to attend the class. "After working with numerous third parties and updating the tools, Valve is opening more direct access to the technology and course work, available free of charge in English and Chinese," the company said in a statement. However, "the full, in person training courses are still available for those interested."

When the technology first became available, more than 500 companies signed up to use it, Valve said. It can be used for peripherals, HMDs, or other devices. The tech is used extensively in the HTC Vive.

Valve also announced that it will be making its SteamVR base stations available later this year. The wireless base station has 120-degree multi-axis laser emitter, and can work with another station to provide a full 360 degrees of coverage.

Valve continues to push the envelope in the VR space. Company boss Gabe Newell recently said that Valve is working on three new games that are fully devoted to VR, and that he believes room-scale VR will eventually become house-scale in the near future.

John Keefer

Contributing Editor

John Keefer is a curmudgeon that has been in journalism for 35 years, the last 16 in the video games industry. He loves real-time strategy games and prefers old-school Total Annihilation to StarCraft. He also loves isometric RPGs, and has been addicted to World of Warcraft for more than 10 years. He sucks at shooters and multiplayer and is purely a PC guy. And being a former member of Shack, he also likes Chatty. Go figure.